News

Pattern points to serial rapist

In the fall of 1978, 19-year-old Theresa Allore disappeared from her Quebec college dorm room. She was discovered dead the next spring, a victim of what police believed was a drug overdose. In 2001, her brother John uncovered evidence she may have been murdered and convinced police to reopen the case. Four years later, however, the probe has stalled, while Mr. Allore's Web-based investigation is gaining momentum. This is the first in a three-part series.

There is the wooded area where hunters reported seeing dark-coloured women's clothing neatly folded on a log in November, 1978, days after his sister vanished.

Then there is the small brook where 19-year-old Theresa Allore's partially clad body was discovered by a muskrat trapper over the Easter weekend of 1979.

When Mr. Allore visited these quiet places, it has been either on his own, in the company of his older brother or with a close friend -- people who understand his need for reverence.

But when he returns tomorrow to that hunters' glen between the village of Austin and the town of Magog, Que., he will not be alone.

A search party will comb the forest for possible clues to Theresa's death 27 years ago, pinning their hopes on the possibility those incongruous garments may have belonged to her.

Among the searchers will be women who have reached out to Mr. Allore in the hope of providing a crucial piece of his puzzle. Mr. Allore set out five years ago on a personal quest to solve the enduring mystery of his sister's death.

But somewhere along the way his journey stopped being that of a brother looking for closure and turned into a search for justice.

He is searching for justice on behalf of more than a dozen women who have been neglected, marginalized and silenced for almost three decades by a legacy of institutional indifference.

Mr. Allore traces the metamorphosis of his journey to the Web site and blog he set up in 2002.

He had uncovered evidence that Theresa had been murdered and convinced Quebec provincial police to reactivate their dormant investigation.

While the probe stalled, www.whokilledtheresa.blogspot.com flourished.

Mr. Allore has now collected accounts of 18 other incidents of intimidation, harassment and sexual assault, any of which may help unravel the enigma of Theresa's fate.

It may only be the tip of the iceberg, he added, because most of the women who have come forward speak English, leaving a huge swath of the francophone population untapped.

"I'm not saying they're all connected," said the 42-year-old father of three, who lives in North Carolina.

"It's that there was enough of them to show a pattern."

The women's accounts bear striking similarities.

Most were hitchhiking, a common practice at the time, when they ran into trouble.

Several described beat-up cars. Two mentioned vehicles with bench seats. In four cases, some sort of tool was used as a weapon.

Some of the women contacted Mr. Allore directly; others he tracked down.

A few wanted nothing to do with him -- for instance, a woman who suffered a gash to her head jumping from a moving vehicle in the winter of 1978.

Another agreed, the first time he called, to tell how she was beaten unconscious and nearly raped while jogging in October, 1980. But more recently, she asked to be left alone.

Others were mortified at having been outed but co-operated, feeling a duty to help.

Jessica, one such woman, retold her ordeal to the National Post.

When she was a first-year student at Champlain College in October, 1978, her roommate started dating an unsavoury man she had met in a bar.

Within weeks he began raping Jessica repeatedly -- the first time when she came down with strep throat and was delirious with fever.

Jessica telephoned police but balked at making a formal complaint out of fear for her safety when she was told the man would likely get bail. So the rapes continued.

"He actually bashed in my bedroom door," Jessica said. "I basically did multiplication tables in my head so I wasn't there, that's how I dealt with it."

Things got worse when the man showed up at the apartment with a gun he said had been used in a murder.

Jessica was forced to accompany him to a local jail to consult an inmate who suggested disposing of the weapon in a river.

Her ordeal ended when she convinced the man her father would come after him if he took her far away, as he had threatened.

Apart from one vicious sexual assault in a Sherbrooke parking garage, none of the incidents resulted in an arrest or conviction -- even when the women did go to police.

"Something you'd think a police agency would pride itself on is clearing a backlog of old cases, otherwise you just have this monkey constantly on your back," Mr. Allore said.

"If you don't deal with this, how can you say you've changed and you can deal with what's happening today?"

Just as the search of the wooded area is the independent initiative of Montreal criminology student Sue Sutherland, Mr. Allore set out on his own in 2001 to learn who killed his sister.

The official conclusion that Theresa died of a drug overdose always haunted the Allore family.

Five months of sleuthing with old friend and investigative journalist Patricia Pearson quickly dispelled the police theory that the straight-A Champlain College student succumbed to her own recklessness.

The autopsy report, though unable to determine a cause of death, clearly stated Theresa had no trace of illicit drugs in her system.

Interviewing old friends about her habits, Mr. Allore and Ms. Pearson hypothesized Theresa may have vanished while hitchhiking.

They suggested she may have left King's Hall residence in Compton to buy cigarettes.

Or she might have thumbed a ride back to campus in Lennoxville to finish a book report on Zen Buddhism.

The pathologist also could not tell whether Theresa had been sexually assaulted.

But Mr. Allore's hopes of having the bra and panties she was found in undergo DNA tests evaporated when he discovered police had long ago thrown the underwear in the trash.

The findings took on new meaning as the amateur detectives learned of two other strange deaths, those of Louise Camirand and Manon Dube.

Both went missing from downtown Sherbrooke and turned up dead in the woods in 1978.

It was clear that Louise Camirand, a 20-year-old part-time archivist at the local hospital, had been murdered and raped.

But 10-year-old Manon's death was attributed to a hit-and-run by a panicking motorist who snatched her body and dumped it outside town.

Renowned Canadian geoprofiling expert Kim Rossmo -- who as a police officer in Vancouver first warned of a predator stalking prostitutes -- crunched data on the three cases.

To him, it looked suspiciously like a cluster -- indicating the work of a possible serial killer.

Five years later, the theory of a predator on the prowl has only been reinforced by the women who have come forward.

A former Bishop's University student journalist contacted Mr. Allore with old news clippings that mentioned eight rapes around Sherbrooke leading up to 1978.

Dug out of her attic, the yellowing newspapers also contained reports of other perpetrators in ski masks making lewd gestures in dark campus halls and men with their pants around their ankles lunging at various female students.

The woman, who asked that her anonymity be respected, also confided her own close call, when she found herself captive in a strange man's car.

"You can't get out," she remembered him telling her with a sinister smile after making a nerve-wracking detour.

"I have to open the door from the outside."

Bad hitchhiking trips were a common theme among the women -- but not all emerged unscathed.

In Theresa's police file, Mr. Allore found out about Diane, (not her real name) who in April, 1979, was sexually assaulted by a man who offered her a ride from Waterville.

Brandishing a long, red-handled screwdriver, he told Diane if she did what he wanted, she wouldn't get hurt.

He raped her several times, then drove her home, warning her not to go to police because he was a cop himself. He flashed a badge to bolster his claim.

Sue, who asked that only her first name be used for this article, may have narrowly escaped a similar fate when she thumbed a ride to a Sherbrooke shopping centre in the summer of 1977.

The driver veered up a dirt road and parked behind an isolated electrical shed, then got out of his small, boxy car and began rummaging in the trunk.

Beginning to panic, Sue had an epiphany that likely saved her.

The man got back in the car wielding a long-handled screwdriver and pounced on Sue.

"I took my cigarette and I burned him in the face. That shocked him," she recalled. "Then I started kicking."

She escaped and flagged down a passing milk truck. Sue went to the police but was met with a shrug.

"I wondered if it was because I was English," she said.

Perhaps the most heartbreaking story to emerge was posted on the blog just last February, when a woman worked up the courage to unburden herself of the secret she had borne for nearly 30 years.

"I needed to see my dots on the map," she explained, asking to be identified in this report as Katharine.

In January, 1977, Katharine arrived at the Sherbrooke depot in the middle of a blizzard, returning to school after Christmas holidays.

A nice man drove her part of the way back to King's Hall. But she waited in the driving snow for 20 minutes until "the devil came along."

As they approached the college residence, the second man ignored her directions to turn up the driveway and pulled into a wooded area.

He stopped the car and told 17-year-old Katharine she owed him something for bringing her so far out of his way.

He unzipped his pants and forced her to perform oral sex.

He told Katharine he knew where she lived if ever she breathed a word of what had transpired.

"I walked all the way up to the residence," she said, "put my bag in my room, went to take a shower and never told anyone about this for 25 years."

To Mr. Allore's frustration, detectives at provincial police headquarters have for the most part failed to follow up leads the blog has generated since taking over the case from local detachments in 2002.

"I've always been taught that a good investigator tracks every lead, and what I always hear from the police is 'Why would I run that down?' " he said.

"It astounds me that they wouldn't have the intellectual curiosity to talk to every single one of these people."

The official line from the Surete du Quebec is that Theresa's case is an open file but they're not yet convinced she met with foul play.